The number of end user devices such as set-top boxes, DSL modems, gateways, etc. has greatly increased over the last few years. In response to this growth of end user devices in the marketplace, the Broadband Forum has defined a standard for managing these types of devices. The standard is referred to as TR-069 or CWMP and is incorporated herein by reference. Included in the standard are a number of technical reports, specifying data models available for the end user devices. The data models specify objects available to the end user device, the parameters associated with the objects and other information such as an indication whether the parameters are available for change through a communication link.
The Broadband forum provides schema and definition files for each data model allowing an end user device management system to import the data model files and manage the device. As the market for end user devices has evolved, most vendors have extended the data models provided by the Broadband Forum to include vendor specific objects and parameters to provide distinctive features for the vendor's products. The extension of the standard data models with vendor specific objects and parameters has proven problematic to end user device management systems. In one example of the associated problems, many vendors do not provide a data model definition in a standard format that an end user device management system can import or if a data model is provided, it typically is out of date with the objects and/or parameters implemented in the end user device. In another example, although a particular vendor may provide up-to-date data model files for the current version of their software, they do not provide data model files for previous versions of their software.
The result of this evolution is that users of an end user device management system must manually define the vendor extensions in the end user device management system or encourage each vendor to release data model files, including the vendor's extensions, for each version of the vendor's software released to the market. Consequently, market pressure is building for a mechanism allowing reliable and version complete support of end user device data models in an end user device management system without any error prone manual data entry.